Hello everyone.
I wonder if it’s possible to create real 2D games with Armory, I mean by NOT faking 2D with an orthogonal camera.
Thanks in advance for any help.
I don’t think that is possible because Armory is fundamentally a 3D engine at its core.
Still, faking it has worked pretty well on simple games that I have seen others make, and I don’t know that it is fundamentally inefficient.
Agree. “Armory is all about 3D and integration with Blender.” There are plenty of good 2D engines already out there … for Haxe.
Thanks, I only like Armory
What would be “real 2D games”? I haven’t done anything myself with 2D in Armory so I’m curious about the differences. What is missing from the workflow?
I mean 2D games which don’t fake 2D using a sideview orthogonal camera
Ok but isn’t that how a lot of engines do their 2D? What makes it different?
Because I like Armory more than any other engine.
What I meant to ask is: What makes it different in the workflow to how the 2D part is “processed”? For example, from the top of my head I might say pixel perfect collision for 2D, not sure if that is possible inside Armory, that’s a difference.
Oh, excuse me.
Eg, if you use 3d, is it possible to constraint it to 2d?
Should the answer be yes, then let’s close this
Plus, I’d like to have the ability to create games like Donkey Kong Country, where the levels has some kind uf “up and down”, which is like 2.5D.
I did search a video on YouTube, but I can’t find one in which this is evident enough.
Edit: I mean the SNES one
You can create physics constraints that restrict movement to two dimensions. Like @M_Ent8h said, I think the hard part would be if you wanted pixel perfect aspects. Otherwise, I think that using 2D constraints inside of 3D should be fine. Even the 2D graphics API that Armory uses is actually based on the 3D one at a lower level so performance-wise I think there isn’t much disadvantage to it. You would just want to turn down the rending settings as much as possible so you aren’t wasting processing for it.
So, still wonder why I love Armory?
Thanks.
What about making the faked 2D follow a path and consider it like flat?
Like as in pathfinding? I haven’t done much work with pathfinding, but if your navmesh is flat then the pathfinding would be 2D.
If you mean otherwise, for most things it is just a matter of ignoring the 3rd dimension in your math ( logic node or otherwise ), or by multiplying the position dimension you aren’t using by zero to eliminate any movement in that direction.
No, I don’t know how I can describe the idea.
It’s like a railway track, you keep going forward, but as the level “requires”, you go on along z, still considering the space as a flat surface
Consider for instance this web-page:
There are many “game engines” for Haxe that are specifically built for 2D games. (“HaxeFlixel” and “HaxePunk” are some of the most well-known.) These generally arise out of the Flash games tradition. But, they offer the same platform-independence that Armory3D does, albeit in a different way. They include their own game development kits.
To me, Armory3D is “an impedance mismatch” with regard to this game-space. Armory’s built to do what it does and to do it extremely well. But, like Blender itself, that world is 3D. If what you want to do is 2D, I do not think that it is the proper tool for the job. (“Don’t use a hammer to drive a screw.”)
Yes, I know.
But I dislike to bloat my toolbox
Ah, I understand. I don’t know how you would do that.
It is good to understand that Armory does offer things that you can’t get anywhere else, even when comparing it to those 2D engines, though.
For example:
- With Flixel, you have to write a bit of code to manually integrate with an editor like Tiled to create maps. With Armory you have an editor built-in and you don’t have to code for it.
- With Armory you have logic nodes, a luxury that I haven’t found as effective anywhere else.
These kinds of things make Armory the only option for artists that are not competant programmers who can learn Haxe.
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Another thing is that Grease Pencil is now a thing other than for annotations. I’m not sure if the GP objects are exposed right now to the Blender Api, but if they are, maybe it could be taken advantage of and be utilized for Armory in 2d projects, just a thought.
The workflow could be very similar to Flash in that regard, using the drawing aspect inside of Blender.
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Yeah. There was a really old example of Armory rendering a grease pencil animation once. Now that Blender 2.8 is stable it should be more possible to work that in.